


you try to move your feet

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Brain Damage, Brainwashing, Gen, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 20:23:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2554403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The military reprograms Helena, and she forgets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you try to move your feet

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Sam's post](http://sanetwin.tumblr.com/post/101545879336/do-not-imagine-the-military-trying-to-de-program), because wow I didn't know I was friends with a _sadist_.
> 
> ...No, I totally knew that.
> 
> Keep in mind I know nothing about science at all, so this is some fictional version of reprogramming. Play along.

They tell Helena it’s not going to hurt. They tell Helena it’s going to help. They tell Helena she has been hurt before, and they want to fix that.

Helena thinks of Henrik, who said the same thing, and stroked a hand through her hair.

She says “No.”

So they strap her down.

—

Helena’s head hurts all the time, now, every time she wakes up, strapped down to the bed; sometimes she thinks she is back with the bad men, the ones who shoved metal between her legs. Sometimes she thinks this is some new way for Tomas to punish her. Sometimes she thinks of convents.

Helena doesn’t let herself wonder if Sarah is coming to get her. She can’t think about that. She can’t let Sarah be real in here, with her hurting, she can’t. Helena’s head hurts all the time, now, and she thinks she knows the ceiling by heart.

—

Helena’s head hurts, when she wakes up. She doesn’t know where she is, for a moment – she thinks she’s with the bad men, the ones who – who did something to her. Her brow furrows; she can’t remember what they did. It was bad, she knows. She remembers someone asking her about it, asking her very important questions. She remembers the taste of mustard.

A man walks into the room. Helena doesn’t think he’s one of the bad men, but she can’t be sure; she pulls against the restraints, anyways, because her brain says things on her wrists are bad, except when they are zipties, _meathead_ her brain says, Helena is confused and Helena is afraid and the man is yelling something about _sedation_ and—

There is a cold thing poking her. She forgets how to fight.

The last thing she hears is a vague blurry voice saying it’s not going to hurt, it’s going to help, we just want to fix you.

The last thing she sees is an unfamiliar ceiling. Then she is lost.

—

Her head hurts, when she wakes up. She doesn’t know where she is. This should be a problem. Instead everything feels very soft, like when.

“Where am I,” she asks the ceiling. It is mute, and does not answer her.

“Sarah,” she says, because she thinks she’s supposed to. “Sarah.”

That makes her feel something – it cuts through the softness, sharp like a. She thinks she likes it. She wonders if it’s her name. Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.

After a while she remembers that Sarah is her sister. Maybe. This is sharp too. The more she thinks Sarah sister sister Sarah – sounds that aren’t that sharp, really – the more her head hurts, the more her heart hurts, the more awake Helena feels. Helena feels. Helena.

A man walks in, looking a little. “Where am I,” she asks him.

“It’s alright,” he says. “You’re safe. You can relax.”

“Where is my sister,” says the person who is Helena, maybe.

He frowns at her, and everything goes dark again.

—

She wakes up. She is strapped down to the bed. Her head is empty and white. Hollow.

She doesn’t remember—

—

They tell her it helped. They tell her she’d been hurt, before, and they fixed that.

She says “Yes.”

They remove the straps.

—

They call her a tangle of numbers, at first, and then they call her Leda. So that is her name. Leda.

Everyone looks the same, but she doesn’t think she looks like them. When she puts her hands on her scalp she can’t feel hair, which is the same as a lot of them, but she runs her finger over the bridge of her nose in the dark and it doesn’t feel like theirs. She has curves where they don’t. Her words make different sounds than theirs.

She is different. She is Leda. This is what she knows.

—

She spends most of the time in her room, which is blank and white like the inside of her head. She stares at the walls until her eyes blur and water and she thinks she can see colors. Then she shuts them, fast; she likes the way the colors stay the same but the white changes to black. It’s like night and day. There is something that makes her happy about the white and the black and the white but she can’t figure out what it is. So she keeps doing it.

Leda keeps doing it. Which is her name. Probably.

(She doesn’t like it. She forgets about it when they don’t call her it. She is she and her and not really anything else.)

—

One day they bring her to a room covered in mats and they put a man across from her and tell her to fight him. She likes the man. She doesn’t know his name, but she likes him – the face this man has, some of the others have too, and it makes her feel something. So she likes it.

One day they bring her to a room covered in mats and they put a man across from her and tell her to fight him. She doesn’t move. He moves first. He tries to hit her. Her body says no and then he is on the ground, and her body feels like it’s moved.

The people at the corner of the room say things about _muscle memory_ , but her brain has slid away and she doesn’t remember.

He looks strange, on the ground. Like he shouldn’t be there. Like he should be someone else.

It makes her head hurt, like someone’s hit it with something heavy, like _she’s_ on the ground, struggling to get up.

She doesn’t like that. So she walks away.

—

She wakes up in the middle of the night with a harsh “k-” sound falling from her lips like a clipped-wing bird. Sits up. Hugs her knees to her chest. Something in her chest hurts – not her heart but something deeper, something behind her ribs.

“K—” she says to the dark. “Kuh, kuh, kuh.”

The dark says nothing back. She goes back to sleep.

—

She’s tired most of the time, and she doesn’t have anything to do, so she sleeps. Sometimes she dreams, which she doesn’t tell anybody about. In her dreams someone is touching her. Sometimes there is an arm wrapped around her shoulders. Sometimes there are arms wrapped around her waist. Sometimes someone’s hand is touching hers, their palm against her palm.

She wakes up and puts her hand against her hand. It doesn’t quite feel right, but it’s close. So she leaves it there until she falls asleep.

When she wakes up, she doesn’t know why her hands are put together. Hand to hand. When they bring her to lunch she puts her hands together and ask what it means.

The man leading her, whose face she likes for a reason she doesn’t know, says that it’s praying. But he’s not supposed to tell her.

What’s praying, she asks him.

—

Her belly is getting bigger and she doesn’t know why. The people she’s with seem happy that it’s happening, so she thinks it’s good. She’s hungry all the time, so she eats. She thinks that’s good too.

She’s eating in the morning, and it’s good, and she isn’t thinking about anything, and she murmurs, “Might as well eat. You will be fat soon anyways.”

It wasn’t loud enough for anyone to hear her. She doesn’t know why she said it. So she eats and pokes the words in the back of her mind. Fat soon anyways fat soon Grace anyways fat anyways soon Sarah eat might fat.

Huh.

—

Sometimes they bring her to a room and they do tests. She likes those, because they make her feel sharp. Something about sharp is good. It’s like when she stands under the shower water and pokes at her back, which feels different than the rest of her skin. It makes shapes, and when she scratches them with her fingernail they hurt, and that is good, amen.

 

Sometimes they bring her to a room and they do tests. She likes those, because they make her feel sharp. Her body feels and her heart goes thump thump thump and she can see her hands around the doctor’s throat like she’s doing it, like the white-colors on the black-colors. But it’s not real. Her hands are in her lap. They take blood from her and they put her feet above her head and put cold metal in her, and she looks at the ceiling and closes her eyes, opens them, closes her eyes, opens them. Sometimes they bring her to a room and they do tests, with her fingernail they hurt,

because they make her feel sharp. They call her _Leda_ when they do the tests, so that is her name. They tell her simple things, and she does them, and that is good, like being sharp is good. They tell her it’s not going to hurt. They tell her it’s going to help. They tell 

—

Her vision is getting blurry and she’s starting to see colors and she’s about to close her eyes when the door opens very fast and very loud and she jumps, makes a sound, a sound she doesn’t know but she makes it.

There is a person in the door. It is a new person, one she doesn’t know. It is a woman! This is a thing she knows. That makes sense. She is also a woman. Also the woman’s nose looks like her nose. She wonders if the other woman’s back is the same as hers.

She looks different. Her eyes are wet. Her chest is moving very fast, like the man on the ground,

“Oh, god, _Helena_ ,” she says, but she – _Leda_ , she will call herself Leda, there are two “she”s and it makes her head hurt – Leda only knows what one of those words means.

“Are you going to take me to eat,” Leda says slowly – if she says things slowly she can make them sound like the way other people say them, and that is probably good.

The woman in the door makes a sound that is close to laughter and says, “Yeah, meathead, we can eat whatever you want once we get the hell out of here.”

She looks at Leda expectantly. Leda stands up the bed, and follows her.

“We have to _run_ , Helena,” says the woman, but her brow is furrowed and she is looking confused.

“Okay,” says Leda, and she starts running towards the mess hall. But then there is a hand wrapped around her hand and she is running a different way and she is confused and her head hurts and her head hurts and her head hurts and everything is very very sharp, like being stabbed. With a needle? No, not with a needle.

—

The woman takes Leda somewhere new, where the walls aren’t white. It is a small room on wheels that is called a truck, which Leda knows. Leda doesn’t like it. The walls aren’t white but they still aren’t white when she blinks and there is something wrong about eyes-open and eyes-shut being the same thing. There is something bad about it. They aren’t the same.

The woman is looking at Leda. Leda looks back. When she closes her eyes, the woman’s face is still there. So that’s a new thing to do.

“Helena,” the woman says slowly, and Leda says, “I do not know what that means.”

—

Her head hurts her head hurts her head hurts her head hurts her head hurts her head hurts her

—

“Wait, are you saying she doesn’t _remember?_ ”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m _saying_ , Cos, she doesn’t know who I am, she – they _did_ something to her, again, and it’s my bloody fault—”

“Hey, hey, you’re okay, don’t cry. Sarah? Sarah, you’re okay. We’re going to make this okay.”

—

head hurts

—

Everything is new and confusing and it hurts and she doesn’t like it. Hurts. There are new people and they all want her to know their names, which is what they all have. She doesn’t even remember Leda, sometimes, which is the name that she has. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to remember all the others.

Everything slides around. But she is mostly certain of a few things:

Sarah is the one Leda sees the most. She looks at Leda a lot. She cries a lot. She reminds Leda of her dreams, which is nice, so she thinks she likes her. Sarah makes everything very very sharp. It hurts? But also she likes it. Sarah says things like _you used to like this_ or _do you remember this_ and Leda has to say a lot that she hadn’t seen Sarah before Sarah moved her to this new place. She should probably ask about tests, but with Sarah here she doesn’t need the tests to make her sharp so that is fine.

Cosmine – Cosira – _Cos_ (which is what Sarah says) is a woman, like Sarah. She makes sure Sarah does things like eat, and sleep, which is good. Leda sleeps a lot anyways. When they give her food she eats it. But Sarah won’t eat and Sarah won’t sleep. She looks at Leda a lot. She cries a lot. She reminds Leda of her dreams, which she’s lucky Cos is there to take care of her.

And when Cos takes care of Sarah it makes everything in Leda so sharp her eyes get wet. Then she closes her eyes, which is the next part of the game, but her eyes stay wet anyways.

There is another woman with gold hair who is a woman not like the other women and she comes and asks Leda questions and writes things down. Leda thinks she does other tests but thinking about it makes her brain slip so she doesn’t.

There is a man who is not like other men. His name is Felix. He doesn’t make Leda feel much and he doesn’t really do anything. Leda forgets about him, when he isn’t there. He isn’t important.

There is something important that Leda is slides around. But she is mostly certain of a few things.

She doesn’t know where the other men are, with their face. She doesn’t know why they’re not doing tests. Thinking about that makes her tired.

—

Her head hurts.

—

She wakes up in the middle of the night with her eyes wet, and she remembers that this is crying, and that it means that she is _sad_. Sad is not a good thing, she doesn’t think.

When she sits up on the couch she can’t see Sarah looking at her, and that makes her _sad_. Sad! Sad. She gets up and walks to the bed, where Sarah is. She looks at Sarah. This makes her eyes very wet. This makes her very sad.

Sarah wakes up, and looks at Leda looking at her.

She sits up.

“Hey,” she whispers, “you okay,” and Leda says “Sarah, why do you make me sad?”

Sarah looks at her, and then she looks away, and then Sarah is crying too.

—

Leda’s hair is growing. It is rough under her fingers, when she rubs it. She likes rubbing it. She likes touching.

Sometimes she rubs her hand over her stomach, too, because she knows that it’s good that it’s growing. They told her so.

Sarah doesn’t like it. Sarah looks at it and cries, because she is sad. So Leda only rubs her stomach when Sarah isn’t there. She hums to it. This is something she is supposed to do. She doesn’t realize it’s a bad thing until the man who is – something – looks at her and asks “Where’d you learn sixties’ pop, He – Leda?”

Then she forgets how the song goes, and everything hurts for a while, and her hair is growing. It is rough under her fingers, when she rubs it. She likes rubbing it, because when she rubs it her head doesn’t hurt. Her head doesn’t hurt. Her head doesn’t hurt.

—

One day there is another woman, who is the same as the other women, but also afraid. Leda doesn’t know how she knows the other woman is afraid, but she knows it. She keeps saying _Helena_ over and over and it makes Leda’s head hurt, because she doesn’t know the word. She thinks it is supposed to be her name but that doesn’t make _sense_ she’s already got a family and it is Leda. _Leda_ is her name. They said that one first so it has to be true. It has to be true. But this woman’s name is and she keeps touching her hands all over her chin and face and the hair that hangs down over her forehead and she keeps saying “Helena.”

“ _Stop_ ,” Leda moans, and then Leda stops, because she doesn’t think that’s what she’s supposed to do, say _stop_. That isn’t right. Then she thinks she is supposed to hurt Alison, who is the woman, but that’s not right either. Everything is wrong. Everything in Leda is hurt, everything in Leda is a big ball of hurt.

She curls in on herself, around her stomach, and she can hear people yelling, she can hear Sarah yelling, but that makes her tired and sharp and hurting and tired and so she lets her mind stop thinking about it.

—

They let her choose what to eat, and that makes Leda afraid. But her stomach roars after everyone has left, and she knows eating is good, so she goes to the kitchen and looks at all the food.

Her body says she is supposed to eat all of it. So she eats all of it, even when it feels like too much, even when she has to stop partway through to throw up. She has to keep eating. It’s the right thing to do.

She doesn’t know why she feels like this. She never felt like this before.

She thinks maybe it has something to do with the yelling and other people yelling and something that comes after that, after people being angry. Something that needs Leda to have a full belly. She doesn’t know what it is.

People come back, eventually, Sarah and Felix and Cos, and when they come back they all stop to look at her and she realizes she is sitting in the middle of the food crying. There is vomit on the floor and her mouth tastes like sugar and bile and she is crying.

Everyone is very silent. Something about that is worse than the yelling.

—

After that they start telling her when and how to eat, which makes her more sharp, but also soft, and it is confusing, and so she doesn’t think about it. But it is nice too. Sarah will sit and watch her eat and tell Leda stories about things Sarah did with her sister. Leda likes the stories, because they make her so sharp she can’t breathe. Leda doesn’t like the stories, because they make her want to hurt Sarah, and she doesn’t know why. She wonders who Sarah’s sister is. She wonders if Cos is Sarah’s sister.

“Is Cos your sister,” she asks after one story, a story Leda doesn’t really remember.

“No,” says Sarah, quietly, “my sister’s lost. But I’m trying to help her find her way home, okay?”

Something about that is very sad. Leda looks at Sarah’s face and closes her eyes, so that Sarah’s face is floating in the middle of the dark, lost. Then she opens her eyes, and Sarah isn’t lost anymore.

“I hope she finds her way back,” Leda says, and Sarah closes her eyes and says “Me too.”

—

Sometimes they leave Leda alone in the room, and sometimes she stops trying to make everything go back to white and walks around and looks at things. There are patterns on the wall Leda doesn’t understand. There are drawers, and clothes when Leda opens them, and she smells some of the clothes and they smell like Sarah.

There are paintings in a stack in the corner of the room. They are of women’s faces. There is not one of her. Leda scratches at one of them, to see if she is underneath. Instead she just gets colors under her nails.

She likes all of them except the red; red makes her head hurt, makes more hurt-pictures appear in front of her eyes. Her back hurts. Her head hurts. But also she _wants_ to hurt, which makes her head hurt more. She wants to hit her hand against her face and she wants to do _something_ to her back to make it hurt right. Everything should be sharper. She wants Sarah to touch her. Maybe if she scratches her back right it will—

She wants Sarah to touch her. Leda closes her eyes very tight to make the colors stop being the ones under her nails and holds onto that thing like a thing that will save her. She wants Sarah to touch her. She keeps her eyes closed very tight and doesn’t move until the door opens and Leda hears footsteps and then Sarah’s voice saying, “Hey, hey, you okay?”

Leda opens her eyes, and sees Sarah’s face, and is happy that she remembered. She holds up her hand, the one without paint under it. She holds it in front of Sarah.

Sarah looks at Leda’s hand, and then Sarah puts her hand against Leda’s hand, and Leda starts crying, and it feels right, like something that is supposed to be happening. It feels like something that has happened. It feels good. Leda wants more of it, so she presses her arm against Sarah’s arm and then she moves and moves that arm and moves both her arms and then hugs Sarah, which is right and good and good and good and so sharp and Leda wants to do this all the time and she loves Sarah, which is true. She buries her head in Sarah’s shoulder and breathes in the smell of leather, which makes a word appear in front of her eyes, like opposite colors, and a big red heart-shape. They aren’t real, but they are real.

“Sarah,” she says into Sarah’s shoulder, “what is _Kira?_ ”

—

When they bring Leda to the new room for the first time the woman who is called Sarah pulls her through a string of beads (and Leda wants to look at them but they’re gone and then they’re gone) and shows her glass with a woman on it.

“That’s you,” she says. Her voice is sharp. Sharp like Leda feels with Sarah’s skin touching her skin. Not sharp like angry. Sharp like hurting.

Leda looks at the glass. She remembers the idea of mirrors.

**Author's Note:**

> It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song.  
> You can't believe it; you were always singing along.  
> It was so easy and the words so sweet.  
> You can't remember; you try to move your feet.  
> It was so easy and the words so sweet.  
> You can't remember; you try to feel the beat...  
> \--"Eet," Regina Spektor
> 
> Please leave kudos + comment if you enjoyed! Thanks!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [36\. blackout](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8996923) by [piggy09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09)




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